Adventures in Teaching Kids How to Code

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Month: July 2015

Code Club want to say a big thank you to the fine folks at Bytemark, a York-based hosting company who are generously providing a large portion of our server space requirements for free.

Code Club UK has, for some time, been hosting our websites with Bytemark. This is a service that they give us free of charge, and this is a big deal for us. Code Club is funded by donations such as this one, and without the generosity of companies like ByteMark we’d be unable to do what we do.

By allowing us to host our services for free, Bytemark effectively contributes around £3000 to £4000 a year in server and bandwidth costs!

In addition to their financial support, Bytemark’s tech support is equally fantastic, and we’re really happy to host our websites and services with them :D

Coming up at the end of July is a fantastic opportunity for enthusiastic young digital makers and tech fans to get stuck in with some summer holiday coding fun – the Young Rewired State Festival of Code!

Open to children aged 18 and younger, we think the Festival of Code is an awesome event for our Code Club members. There’s also opportunities for our volunteers to get involved as well! We spoke to Young Rewired State’s Managing Director, Ruth Nicholls, who told us a bit more about the event and what’s on offer…

“Every August, Young Rewired State runs the world’s largest annual hackathon for young people. The ‘Festival of Code’ is a week-long celebration of young technology talent, bringing together coders aged 18 and under from all across the UK – and the world – to build projects together which solve real world problems. We welcome any young person who has had some, even just basic, coding experience and most importantly loves digital making and wants to learn more! Over the past six years, we’ve worked with over 2,000 young people in the UK and abroad, with lots of our alumni now returning to mentor the next generation of young coders.

At the Festival our community gather from Monday to Thursday at volunteer-led local centres to make new friends and prototype projects using their coding skills and open data. They then come together for the Festival weekend where they showcase what they have built to parents, mentors, press, industry and expert judges.

The Festival of Code 2015 is taking place from July 27th to August 2nd and is going to be our biggest and best event yet. As well as the open data hackathon, we’re showcasing the best and brightest in technology today at our YRS Makerspace. We’re also excited to expand our community with 75 centres across the UK and five international centres participating remotely across three continents.

If any of Code Club’s community of young coders would like to participate in the Festival of Code, they can register here and a full list of local centres can be found here.

We’d love to have your support during the week too. If any Code Club volunteers would like to mentor at the Festival, we’d love you to get in touch here.”

On Tuesday we attended the launch of the BBC’s exciting new micro:bit project in London. As a partner organisation of the BBC’s flagship Make It Digital initiative, which aims to get more young people across the UK involved in digital making and computer science, Code Club couldn’t be more excited to see the new micro:bit revealed in all its pocket-sized glory!

The micro:bit, measuring just 4cm by 5cm, is a stripped down computer which children can use to code and create anything they set their minds to! It’s intended as a starter device to give children a basic introduction to physical computing and tinkering, so that they can move on to using the more advanced machines such as Arduino, Galileo and Kano.

Key features of the micro:bit include:

A display consisting of 25 red LEDs

Two programmable buttons

On-board motion sensor or “accelerometer”

A built-in compass or “magnetometer”

Bluetooth Smart Technology

Three Input and Output (I/O) rings

The introduction of the micro:bit has been inspired by the success of the BBC Micro back in the 1980s (a tool which gave a lot of our Code Club volunteers their first hands-on experience with coding and computer science).

Speaking at Tuesday’s event the BBC’s Director General, Tony Hall said: “Just as the BBC Micro introduced millions to personal computers 30 years ago, the BBC micro:bit can help equip a new generation with the digital skills they need to find jobs and help grow the UK economy.”

We’ll be supporting the BBC micro:bit initiative by creating a set of learning resources for the device, which will be available to use in our Code Clubs to help children harness the power of the device and to see the impact that programming can have on their day-to-day lives.

Children will learn introductory programming and computational thinking concepts, and apply them in making a range of fun programs for their micro:bit.

We’re also really thrilled that the BBC will be providing us with 20,000 micro:bits so that our Code Club members and volunteers can get a chance to use them too – for free! Stay tuned for further details coming soon.